On virtualization…
Well, I quit using VirtualBox for my virtualization needs. I am now using kernel based virtualization, or kvm. Kvm offers many advantages, in my opinion, the key being the simplicity and ease of use. I did not like the VBox abstraction.
- kvm’s core code is *in* the kernel, userspace tools are in a package. Kvm is part of Linux and uses the regular Linux scheduler and memory management. This means that kvm is much smaller and simpler to use. [1]
- kvm is Free Software released under the GPL.
- kvm uses processor extensions (HVM) for virtualization.
- kvm supports 64bit guests out of the box.
Also, kvm is a breeze to setup. In a nutshell, create the img. kvm-img create gentoo-amd64.img 10G then boot the gentoo live cd. kvm -hda gentoo-amd64.img -cdrom /path/to/iso -boot d. Then follow the gentoo install handbook. Simple.
Lastly, kvm images are easily transportable and will run on other hosts (within reason, can’t run a 64bit guest on a 32bit host, etc). As a matter of fact, I present to a amd64 guest if you would like to use it*, here. Unpack it, and it will decompress to 15-16G (sparse files). Then you can start it by simply running kvm /path/to/img. In that guest you will find a pretty recent stage 3 install and emerge -e world done. There are a few other essential apps on there (vim & dhcpcd). From there, you can emerge xorg-x11, a DE, do whatever you want, really. I am using that guest to test out xfce development efforts and to be sure that we can bring you guys xfce-4.6 asap, once it is ready 
Cheers, and have fun playing with kvm!
It might be fun to post more VMs like this in the future, if tb will host ‘em all.
I wish I could ditch my virtualbox and get use kvm, but my processor does not support native virtualization
Do you have an easy example to get networking working? that has basicly the only thing keeping me on VBox instead of kvm (all i really need is nat networking as it is called in vbox, an internal dhcp server and a software transport to the real interface) Also know even the simplest of gui’s for kvm? like a list and when you double click it launches one? I looked at writing on in python/gtk but it never got off the ground…
disregard the comment about networking… they must have added -net user since about version 63
@Cynyr
Have a look at qemulator, a front end for qemu. The faq indicates that it should work with kvm too, although it has not been well tested yet.
There are contradictory reports floating around concerning the efficiency esp. comparing kvm and virtualbox; examplum gratia:
http://ww1.4hf.de/2008/08/virtualisierung-desktop-virtualisierung-im-vergleich.html
cites really outstanding benchmarks esp, for virtualbox
How are your experiences with kvm so far? Are you content?
Kind regards!
@Cynyr: nat networking worked for me out of the box. I had a harder time getting VBox networking to work right.
Also, you can pass -smp to the kvm arguments and your vm will have multiple processors. This way I can keep my host cpu usage at 100% (if desired) vs 40-50% max with VBox. Maybe there is a way to tweak this in VBox..not sure though.
@Bruce: thx for the hint, I will look into that myself and bring the ~amd64 kw to it if it works.
@manfred: I didn’t think the best of VBox performance. Disk I/O took a horrible hit and compilation was slow. I don’t have any concrete numbers and this is my opinion of course but at least I *did* try both
On the topic of kvm frontends:
qemulator is a mess on amd64. I did eventually get it to work by unpacking the tarball and running it from there (it is a simple python script) but the ebuild is no where near ready for amd64.
virt-manager has about ~80 deps on my machine and I don’t care to install it. I think Ubuntu may be going down that route. [1] The screenshots of this one look promising.
virt-viewer: haven’t quite figured out how to use this.
others?
[1]: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/282/
QtEmu [1] is an other frontend for kvm/qemu.
[1] http://qtemu.org/